Bette
Now THERE is a message!
WOMEN OF THE WORLD! We are being stripped of our rights over our bodies, our lives and even of our name! They don’t call us “women” anymore; they call us “birthing people” or “menstruators”, and even “people with vaginas”! Don’t let them erase you! Every human on earth owes you!
— bettemidler (@BetteMidler) July 4, 2022
Good for her! Maybe the dam is breaking.
How long before this escalates from “I’m so disappointed”, “Not you too”, and “I wish you’d reconsider” to “CHOKE ON MY GIRL DICK, TERF!”?
Many of the “disappointed” responses are denying that the word “woman” is being erased at all, and that “inclusive” language is simply being added. Tell that to to the ACLU, PP, etc., whose efforts to remove “woman” and its derivatives have been highlighted here on B&W. Naivety, or disingenuousness?
The price of all liberty is eternal vigilance; that of the female variety likewise.
YNNB?@2: It may also be thoughtlessness, which I do think accounts for a lot of the rank-and-file support for TRAs, especially online. They simply haven’t considered that the ‘inclusive’ approach would simply be including the phrases “and trans men” and “and trans women” occasionally (as appropriate to the discussion–there are some cases where trans women, especially those with a high ‘Passing Score’, will experience many of the same consequences of misogyny as women do; in other cases, such as abortion discussions, trans men are the group needing ‘including’).
I think accomodating TiFs is tactically useful, but is pretty much an afterthought to genderists. The fact that there’s no move towards a comparable erasure of men in the interests of “inclusion” is telling. All the things we’re told that “aren’t happening”, or that “nobody’s doing” are happening and being done. The conflation of sex with gender is just the prelude to replacing sex with gender (as in the redefinition of woman and homosexuality away from physical, biological, bodily facts). Decoupling woman from “embodied reality” allows it to be replaced by “social construct” that can include men. The main goal is to put the category of “woman” into doubt and up for grabs, which benefits TiMs. Including” TiFs by using dehumanizing, atomizing, and anatomizing language that sucks the “femaleness” out of being a woman is more important than actually doing TiFs any favours. If TiMs didn’t exist, but TiFs did, none of this would be happening.
We will never see information about prostate cancer revised to talk about “prostate havers” and ED drugs marketed to “erection wanters.”
I’m not sure we should be seeing Ms. Midler as a feminist heroine. Her early work suggests she might be one of those trans-mermaids. ;-D